oa Editorial [Hot Topic: Modern Omics-Based Platform for High Throughput Screening for Novel Drug Targets (Part 1) (Guest Editor: Canhua Huang)]

Omics is an emerging area that aims to understand molecules as networks using mathematical, statistical and computing methods to solve biological problems involving nucleotides, amino acid sequences and other related information. It encompasses huge amounts of data relevant to genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, interactomics, cytomics and bioinformatics. Using omics-based platforms, unprecedented potential has been endowed on researchers to screen cells at the gene, transcript, protein, metabolite and interaction network level in the search for novel drug targets. More importantly, it enables us to elucidate the primary mechanism-of-action of certain drugs, further understand their side effects in unanticipated off-target interaction, validate existing drug candidates and find seminal potential therapeutic applications for an established drug, thus facilitating the translation from bench to bedside. In this volume, we have invited a number of scientists who are at the forefront in the development and application of high throughput omics-based technologies for the characterization of novel drug targets to share their expert knowledge in this series of reviews. These topics range from explicit preamble of the serological analysis of recombinant cDNA expression libraries (SEREX) technology to several of the most widely applied and emerging technologies available for novel druggable target screening. In addition, the metabolomic signatures of certain diseases that would become potential targets for therapy have also been explicitly elucidated. Although it may be difficult to encompass all available approaches and/or instrumentation in a single issue, these articles have included the most widely utilized approaches in the current drug target screening environment. We hope that our readers will find the articles featured in this volume (part 1 - issue 3 and part 2 - issue 4) useful and informative for their own drug target screening projects.